I was busy working (scrolling Instagram) when an ad for this product caught my eye. The promo page contained an alarming amount of content about a fictional merger (“THE MERGER”) between Peanut Butter Group and Chocolatey Corp to create a company playfully nicknamed “PBC.”
The website included a timeline of the two businesses, bios about the CEOs (one of whom was played by Gerri from Succession in a tiny movie that accompanied the text), even a twenty-three-slide PowerPoint presentation, which I admit I downloaded but only glanced at, because I draw the line at performing labor for peanut butter under late capitalism.
Clearly, Jif’s marketing department understood the assignment and really, really committed to the bit. But corporations skew evil and the characters on Succession were soulless greed goblins. And while that made for some excellent prestige TV, why would comparing the creation of choco-fied peanut butter to a corporate acquisition make me want to eat it?
I was still pondering that question when I got on the 7 train and headed to Target on Third Avenue, the nearest location that still had the spread in stock. On my way, I texted my husband to ask if he needed anything from the store so I could pretend I wasn’t traveling to another borough of New York City for the sole purpose of buying a novelty nut butter. “Toothbrushes,” he responded, unwittingly enabling me.
As I checked the aisles of the store for PBC, I wondered whether combining chocolate and peanut butter into one uniform product would be superior to delicacies that put the two side by side but left their respective identities intact. I was partial to the sweet-salty hybrid of a chocolate peanut butter cup or, in a pinch, a handful of chocolate chips in a spoonful of Skippy. I worried THE MERGER was going to be the pasty equivalent of two friends you used to love hanging out with, but then they become a romantic couple and grow insufferable because you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I finally located the Jif conglomerate. It cost $3.79, a bafflingly paltry price tag for what I’d been led to believe was the Waystar Royco-GoJo of nut-based condiments. Maybe the shareholders were displeased with the merger, causing the retail price to tank? Sorry, I don’t even know what that means. Although I read lots of think pieces about the Succession finale, I still don’t understand anything about business, other than the importance of wearing high-waisted trousers à la Shiv.
Upon arriving home I placed my husband’s toothbrushes in the bathroom, then opened the jar and plunged a spoon into the homogenous dark brown substance contained therein. The texture was smooth and easy to scoop out in the way that highly processed, creamy sugar bombs at room temperature tend to be. To no one’s surprise, it tasted, if not ambrosial, then solidly yummy.
The biggest downside was that the chocolate vastly overpowered the peanut butter, like Gerri sexually dominating Roman over the phone until he proposed marriage. I felt like I was eating fudge-flavored frosting straight out of a Duncan Hines canister that had only the faintest notes of peanut. It tasted as if the makers of Nutella had swapped out the hazelnuts and rebranded it as Peanutella. Rather than two power players joining forces on equal footing, poor old Mom and Pop Peanut were the victims of a hostile takeover by Big Chocolate.
I had a spoonful of regular Kirkland natural peanut butter afterward for comparative research. The unadulterated taste of peanuts almost knocked me off my feet, like an excited golden retriever jumping into your arms when you come home after a long day at the office.
While this business deal might have been above board with the FTC, I’m not sure it was in either of the companies’ best interests. The chocolate wasn’t improved by the hint of nuttiness. And the peanut butter was all but absorbed by the invisible hand of chocolate, in a poignant lesson about the evils of capitalism—or the kind of food I buy when I’m about to get my period.